Support the full vmware customization spec #2954

[fherbert]

Add support for the full vmware customization spec as per https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.wssdk.apiref.doc/vim.vm.customization.Specification.html

[fherbert]

@nirvdrum Anything I can do to help get this merged into master?

[nirvdrum]

Sorry. I'll try to take a look at this soon. Life was conspiring against me. I got through most of the rest of the vSphere backlog and hope to be fully clear this week.

[nirvdrum]

Having briefly looked though, do you know whether these changes are backwards-compatible? There are fog users going back to at least vSphere 4. And there are a lot on 5.1.

[fherbert]

Looks like the customization spec has been around for some time, the earliest reference I can find for it is in SDK Package for VMware VirtualCenter 1.2. It's present in the Vsphere 4 SDK (https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk400pubs/ReferenceGuide/vim.vm.customization.Specification.html)

[nirvdrum]

Yeah, the spec has been around, but the fields might have changed. I just wanted to make sure that that didn't change in an incompatible manner. If not, fantastic.

[fherbert]

I've just done a quick check, all the same options are there in the 4.0 SDK.

[nirvdrum]

That's very helpful, thanks. I'm on my laptop without access to my vSphere cluster, so I can't check currently. But I'll give this a shot this week. I give you permission to spam me if I don't :-)

[fherbert]

I've done a quick write up on how to use this (from Foreman) but there's
some sample yaml to use as a template for the customization spec here
http://www.herbert.org.nz/?p=245
There is one niggle I'm not 100% sure about is if the template has an
existing nic and you don't pass the nicsetting map, vshpere will complain.
So you can see in the yaml I send some dummy data so the nicsetting map
dataype gets created.

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 8:31 AM, Kevin Menard notifications@github.com
wrote:

That's very helpful, thanks. I'm on my laptop without access to my vSphere
cluster, so I can't check currently. But I'll give this a shot this week. I
give you permission to spam me if I don't :-)

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3523 (comment).

[nirvdrum]

I didn't notice any regressions in my own testing. Unfortunately, it's really hard to say how this might impact others. But Foreman is a big consumer of fog's vsphere support, so having it drive the work here helps assuage concerns a lot.

[nirvdrum]

I don't know if this is something you can apply to foreman, but I've found it easiest to clone the VM, delete the NICs, create new NICs, and then run the customize task against the new NICs. It avoids any headaches associated with cardinality of the template's NICs. And it helps ensure the NIC you get is of the type you want on the network you want. You can see how it's managed in Rubber here:

https://github.com/rubber/rubber/blob/e5ff6b56374038cbefedf82fd8468a12d2ddd7c7/lib/rubber/cloud/vsphere.rb#L81-L96

[geemus]

Thanks!

On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 3:35 PM, Kevin Menard notifications@github.com
wrote:

I don't know if this is something you can apply to foreman, but I've found
it easiest to clone the VM, delete the NICs, create new NICs, and then run
the customize task against the new NICs. It avoids any headaches associated
with cardinality of the template's NICs. And it helps ensure the NIC you
get is of the type you want on the network you want. You can see how it's
managed in Rubber here:

https://github.com/rubber/rubber/blob/e5ff6b56374038cbefedf82fd8468a12d2ddd7c7/lib/rubber/cloud/vsphere.rb#L81-L96

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#3523 (comment).